Boing Boing

Our friend Maureen Herman, former bassist for Babes in Toyland, and a frequent contributor to Boing Boing, is the guest on the latest episode of the Hey Human podcast.From the episode's description:Maureen Herman, former bassist for Babes in Toyland, is a writer and musician who is no stranger to showing you her scars. She's candid about where she's been, where she's heading and how hard she tries to stay in the moment. Funny and engaging, Maureen has managed to channel her creativity into a force that, I'd venture to say, has acted like some kind of centripetal pull to keep her on the planet. She endured a lot, probably more than most of us would have been able to handle. Somewhere in her mad-genius is a gentle sweetness that draws you in, but don't underestimate her. I'm pretty sure she sleeps with one eye open. Her new book drops July 2020, and the title says it all; It's A Memoir, Motherfucker.Image: Bene Riobó [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons Read the rest

French economist Thomas Piketty changed the world in 2014 with his magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book that reported out an incredibly ambitious project to map out three centuries' worth of capital flows, and from that, to derive an empirical answer about whether markets are a machine for finding smart people and allocating capital to them so that they can invent things that make us all better off ("meritocracy"), or whether they simply make the people who happened to get rich (possibly by inventing something, more often by inheriting wealth or by being a sociopathic looter) even richer (spoiler: rg, which means that markets' long-run function is to increase inequality by allocating ever-larger pools of capital to rich people who don't do much that's socially beneficial with it).Here's an example of how markets -- even ones with lots of growth -- are much better at enriching the rich than making us all richer, from the 2014 edition:All large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates, regardless of whether the owner of the fortune works or not. To be sure, one should be careful not to overestimate the precision of the conclusions one can draw from these data, which are based on a small number of observations and collected in a somewhat careless and piecemeal fashion. The fact is nevertheless interesting.Take a particularly clear example at the very top of the global wealth hierarchy. Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates -- the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years -- increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. Read the rest

In 1964, a German experiment asked people to randomly tap their fingers -- whenever they wanted -- while having their brain's electrical activity monitored. The scientists discovered something nifty: The Bereitschaftspotential, a little burst of electrical activity the subjects' brains gave off in the milliseconds just before the finger-tap. Neuroscientists were fascinated: We now had a glimpse of the brain's crucial planning activities.In the 80s, things got super weird. The American physiologist Benjamin Libet repeated the experiment and observed the Bereitschaftspotential occurring about 350 milliseconds before the subject decided to move their fingers. In other words, your brain and body were deciding to move your finger before you yourself were aware of your intent to do so. Free will was an illusion.Armchair philosophers went to town on this, as you can imagine: Consciousness is an illusion! We're well and truly just self-deluding bags of meat! etc etc.Then in 2012, Aaron Schurger -- a scientist at Paris' National Institute of Health and Medical Research -- proposed a different explanation for the Bereitschaftspotential. As he knew from his research, the brain is constantly a hive of activity and electrophysiological noise, and like any natural phenomenon with tons of little jittering components, it produces wave-like crests of activity. So maybe the Bereitschaftspotential was just that. Maybe it was just the product of a noisy brain. A couple of top neuroscientists wondered if the original 1964 finger-tap experiment had been misinterpreted, and its correlations misunderstood. Since the decision to tap your finger randomly isn't terribly consequential, maybe the subjects were unconsciously timing their fingertaps with the Bereitschaftspotential. Read the rest

Buzzfeed's Vanessa Wong declares that Tim Cook Will Have To Pry My iPhone SE From My Cold, Tiny Hands.I admit it makes no sense. My behavior is so incomprehensible that I worry I’ll be boiled down to a caricature of myself: a frugal old lady with a frugal old phone. I have a terrific coworker who accidentally asks repeatedly if I still use the small iPhone 5 (which came out in 2012), and yes, I did before I owned the SE (again, small hands), but I am worried it betrays a perception that I keep my phone in a dusty purse that maybe smells like mothballs and hard candy.The thing is, I really shouldn’t be so self-conscious (and it’s probably fine if my phone did smell like mothballs anyhow, who cares). I’m not alone. The iPhone 7 is still the most-used phone in the US. As of mid-2019, it had a 5.2% share of the market, according to survey data provided to BuzzFeed News by Kantar. The SEVEN, people. The one that also came out in 2016. The one that is basically just as old as my beloved SE. And now I know — we holders-on have more power than we realize.I too am still on the iPhone SE. I don't want a big phone; I want a small one. Truth told, though, it is getting long in the tooth, lacking important and useful features and often feeling just plain slow. I'd pay through the nose for a new iPhone SE with the capabilities of the latest entry-level iPhone 11. Read the rest

Apparently mountain chickadees have crazily awesome memories: Despite weighing less than half an ounce, mountain chickadees are able to survive harsh winters complete with subzero temperatures, howling winds and heavy snowfall. How do they do it? By spending the fall hiding as many as 80,000 individual seeds, which they then retrieve — by memory — during the winter. Their astounding ability to keep track of that many locations puts their memory among the most impressive in the animal kingdom.When I read that, I was like: Okay, you have my attention. The rest of that piece in Knowable Magazine is an intriguing Q&A with a researcher who's been doing experiments trying to probe the dimensions of chickadee memory, and how it confers survivability.(CC-2.0-licensed photo of a chickadee courtesy the Flickr stream of Geoffrey Gilmour-Taylor. BTW, it's not a mountain chickadee, it's a black-capped chickadee. But it's ... mountain-chickadee-adjacent, I guess? Anyway.) Read the rest

In Slate, David Polansky argues that the quality of audio in hearing aids is plummeting for the same reason the quality of recorded music plummeted in the age of the MP3: It went digital.Up until the early 00s, hearing aids were often built using analog tech. In the 2000s, though, the six major firms that comprise most of the hearing-aid market all shifted over to digital tech -- and the result, Polansky writes, has been terrible. Much as MP3s truncated the acoustic range of sound to scrunch it into a small signal, users of today's digital hearing-aids have found the sound of the world abruptly reduced:I am well aware of the limitations of the old analog hearing aid technology: It was prone to feedback, and it did not always adjust well to different aural situations, such as crowded restaurants or large auditoriums with poor acoustics. In compensation, the user lived in a world that was saturated with sound, rich and crisp in detail. No amount of added Bluetooth connectivity or Fitbit trackers can change the underlying fact that the digital processor samples incoming sound at a rate far lower than that of an old CD player, effectively turning the entire world into a giant MP3 file. Children’s voices, fallen leaves, birdsong, the Beatles: All of these have been rendered and reshaped so that the listener perceives a wholly synthetic world.For those who are unable to adjust, it is alienating on a neurological level. In fact, it is estimated that almost a quarter of all hearing aid users are not satisfied—often profoundly so—with the sound produced by their hearing aids. Read the rest

Some of the biggest names in business, including the CEOs of Twitter, Uber, Reddit, Conde Nast, Bad Robot and a host of others sent a letter to Congress this morning urging immediate action on gun violence. The letter follows similar pleas from Walmart after shootings at the country's largest retailer left nearly 30 people dead in less than a month. A copy of the letter was shared with the New York Times: Many of the requested actions in the letter have already passed the House, but have been brought to a crawl in the Senate by NRA-pawn "Massacre Mitch" McConnell. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed frustration with a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle who asked about her decision to not bring the House back in August to keep the pressure up on McConnell and the Senate. No reaction to the letter as of yet from Senate Republicans. Shocking, I know.Business Leaders Call on Congress to Act on Gun Violence (NYT) Photo: Michael Spocko/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0) Read the rest

Daniel Beckwitt, a channer with a trust fund, began digging a bunker under his house after his mother died. Driven by survivalist paranoia and reinforced in adjacent ideologies by like-minded internet users, he hired another young man, Askia Khafra, to dig in the growing tunnel system while he blew the days on Reddit and 4chan. Everything was dangerous—the house and basement full of hoarded junk, the bunker a structural deathtrap—and when something terrible happened, it was Askia who could not get out. In The Washington, William Brennan tries to unravel what on Earth happened down there.As neighbors watched the house from their lawns and windows, a county fire investigator made a startling discovery. Squeezing past the furnace amid a tower of junk in the basement, he was headed to shut off the gas meter when something caught his eye: A few feet ahead, there was a hole in the concrete floor. Below it, investigators soon learned, stretched an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers—long, twisting hallways of bare rock that would end up revealing the bizarrest of internet-era fables, and one with a ghastly ending.It's hard to believe it's real. It's like groverhaus, but with a hole leading straight to hell and a murder conviction to take with you. Read the rest

You go away to Burning Ban for a couple of weeks of desert heat, wind, dust and EDM-fueled contemplation, and return to find the tabloids in dire need of a personal transformative experience of their own, still spouting the same fever dream imaginings as before.

This Sunday, the outstanding SF in SF reading series hosts two outstanding authors: Hannu Rajaniemi (Summerland) and Christopher Brown (Rule of Capture). American Bookbinders Museum, 366 Clementina Alley. Doors at 6PM: $10 ($8 students with ID). Read the rest

“Can’t I stay with you?”No?An incredible moment captured by the good people behind New Zealand's Kaikoura Wildlife Rescue. View this post on Instagram Here we repost one of our videos that has been shared widely online 🐧 This blue penguin adult was found by a member of the public and was then transferred to us by the Department of Conservation. The penguin had a significant head wound and suffered from severe exhaustion due to plastic netting entanglement. After treatment and recovery, this patient was successfully released. We observed this penguin for an hour post-release, watching as it swam strongly out to sea, once past the initial breaking waves. Penguins generally appear wobbly on land, but are in their element under water. Ocean conditions are often rough along New Zealand's coast, with this blue penguin being used to such conditions. Blue penguins are the smallest penguin species in the world, hence the tiny size. The reason this individual was not released near a group of penguins, is that blue penguins are largely solitary at sea, as well as being nocturnal on land. Releases are the positive outcome wildlife rehabilitators hope for 💚 Video: Ben Foster #penguin #bluepenguin #penguins #seabirds #wildliferehabilitation #wildliferescue #wildliferehabilitator #helpingwildlife #makingadifferenceA post shared by Kaikoura Wildlife Rescue (@kaikourawildliferescue) on Sep 10, 2018 at 2:20am PDT Read the rest

The Cheney School in Oxford, England, apologized this week after asking students to write suicide notes as part of their English homework. The assignment generated complaints.GCSE English students at Cheney School in Headington, Oxford, were set the task as part of studying J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls. One mother branded the exercise - which invited teenagers to adopt the persona of a young woman in 1912 - a "massive fail".In a statement, the school said it was "very sorry for any distress caused".LINK: Resources for people in crisis Read the rest

The Silent Hall of Fame uploaded a very nice print of Charlie Chaplin's "A Day’s Pleasure" (1919) to Archive.org. Compare it to the version on YouTube.Here's the YouTube upload:And Archive.org's copy is at the top of this post. Read the rest

Here, you need some sweetness.Look at these amazing affectionate birds.Enjoy.Affectionate Blue ParrotsDon't know the source, unfortunately!Affectionate Blue Parrots Read the rest

I stepped outside to take this photo of the catnip plants I'm growing. We have three cats and I enjoy giving them a few fresh leaves and watching their stoned antics.A couple of weeks ago I was at the wonderful Kinokuniya Los Angeles bookstore in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, and came across a photography book called Cats on Catnip by Andrew Marttila. You can see some of the photos from the book on his Instagram account: View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Mar 19, 2019 at 12:01pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Mar 22, 2019 at 12:13pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Aug 2, 2019 at 8:20pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Apr 20, 2019 at 3:21pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Sep 7, 2018 at 1:41pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Aug 17, 2018 at 3:16pm PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Aug 9, 2018 at 8:52am PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Andrew Marttila (@iamthecatphotographer) on Jul 16, 2018 at 11:00am PDT Read the rest

Most airports have filtered water dispensers past the security checkpoint. I take advantage of the free water by traveling with this Vapur Element BPA Free Durable Foldable Flexible Water Bottle. It folds flat or can be rolled up. It has a carabiner for clipping to a pack. Read the rest

I mean he did win a MAJOR AWARD. Read the rest

After Portland's NBC reporter Maggie Vespa wore high-waisted pants last week, a viewer didn't approve of her wardrobe, saying via Facebook that she looked ridiculous in pants.According to USA Today:She replied to him and said she would not change her attire, prompting the viewer to write back while she was on the air live on Friday. In that message, he wrote, "OMG you really looked uncomfortably (sic) tonight. Try dressing like a normal woman. Doesn't KGW pay you enough for a wardrobe makeover?"Her male co-workers were shocked, she said, but this kind of incident is not new for women who work on TV.Vespa said she shared the comments with her mother, who also worked as a news anchor in Peoria, Illinois."She talked about getting horrible, toxic comments from people and unbelievably sexist things that make this look pale in comparison," Vespa said. "So I just thought, 'Let's say something.'"Her response in the segment above is wonderful. Read the rest

A gentleman in Ontario stepped into the street, causing a driver to stop short. The jaywalker was so intent on giving the driver the stink eye that he did not notice a pole that had the temerity to be in his path.Image: YouTube Read the rest

It has been 0 days since Facebook's last privacy scandal. The majority of period tracking apps transmit sensitive data to Facebook the minute you open them, before you interact with them at all, thanks to the common use of Facebook's analytics tool (which nominally gives app developers a free way to track their products' use, but which, not incidentally, allows FB to harvest all that usage data).The data that period-tracking apps share is often incredibly sensitive, including the last time the user had sex, which birth control they use, and so on. Some apps allow you to keep a private diary of your menstrual and sexual activities. This is also sent to Facebook.It's basically a rerun of the ghastly revelations about fertility tracking apps from 2016, except that now it's three years later and the companies involved have learned not one fucking thing from that scandal.One company, MIA Fem, threatened to sue Privacy International and Buzzfeed over Privacy International's handling of its unconvincing denials. Other vendors, like Plackal Tech, makers of the Maya app, minimized the concerns raised by researchers, suggesting that they simply don't take the issue seriously.Facebook is just for starters. The same apps often shared data with less well-known, even slimier analytics firms who largely fly under regulators' and lawmakers' radar (Facebook, for all its failings, is full of people who are terrified that some antitrust or privacy investigation is going to cost the company millions or billions and that they will face the blame -- but small startups that are one quarter away from going broke have no incentive to think about the longterm). Read the rest

Get down to the quark level in this amazing CGI animation by Pedro Machado. Read the rest

ReVae Arnaud-Jensen is deaf. She went to the drive through at a California Jack in the Box to order food, but when she got to the window to order (she reads lips), the employee screamed at her and mocked her. From WTAP:Arnaud-Jensen says she spoke to the store manager and was told the employee was fired. Even so, she intends to stand her ground and pursue legal action."Things done to us, not OK. I will stand and fight for that, for everyone in the community. It’s for you guys, the community, not me but for them, so there will be no more suffering for the deaf community,” she said.Arnaud-Jensen says she is demanding, at the very least, that Jack in the Box train its employees, including the CEO, to understand deaf culture. She hopes what happened to her never happens again. Read the rest

Here's a good tip for threading a needle, especially if you're traveling and need to reattach a button and the hotel sewing kit doesn't come with a threader: use a toothbrush as shown in this video. Read the rest

Margrethe Vestager (previously) is the EU competition commissioner who handed out a bouquet of multibillion-dollar fines to US-based Big Tech companies; she had resigned herself to being ousted after her previous term but in a last-minute surprise she has been granted another turn in office, with a new mandate to create a "Europe fit for the digital age." Vestager's heart is definitely in the right place, even if she has effectively taken forced breakups off the table, judging that the ensuing legal wrangle will do more harm than good, even if it might put Big Tech's execs on notice that bad behaviour has real consequences. Read the rest

Volkswagen upgraded its logo, which previously looked like a shiny button made of chromed plastic coated with a thin layer of diesel exhaust. The new logo sports a stripped-down simplicity that resembles earlier designs. Wisely, the designers didn't include the swastika incorporated into the original logo. Read the rest

The Black Blorchestra performs a gorgeous and stirring rendition of "Glory to Hong Kong" for an audience of protesters in HK, all dressed in the uprising's defacto uniform of masks and helmets. (Thanks, Jeff Wasserstrom!) Read the rest

Natalie Beach recounts her time as the friend, then gofer, then ghostwriter for Caroline Calloway, an Instagram influencer who (for reasons that eventually become clear) is famous only in retrospect. It's a startling and engaging tale, driven by Beach's recollections of envy toward a person she thought she loved, who did not love her back.One night, I went to sleep on my air mattress while Caroline stayed at her desk buying homegoods, and when I woke up the next morning, she was still hunched over eBay in her fur coat, having purchased $6,000 worth of furniture. I went to the communal bathroom and sat on the stone floor with my knees to my chest. I told myself that everyone needed furniture, and it wasn’t my problem. But Caroline’s problems weren’t just my problems; they were my whole world, and so while I was a supporting character in the book, I cast myself as the hero in her life. I reached out to Cambridge about therapy, spoke with her mom about her prescription-pill use. When she wore the same lace gown for two and a half days, even sleeping in it, I forced her into the shower. When she arranged a loose pile of sleeping pills on her nightstand before bed, I swept them into my palm when she wasn’t looking. I pulled open her desk drawer to find a pen, and empty Adderall capsules skittered around like cockroaches exposed to light. The manuscript was due in six months, and my notes were just lists of funny British foods (Scotch eggs, juicy bits). Read the rest

The MIT Media Lab is in crisis after the extent of child-abusing billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's donations became clear. Its director resigned in disgrace after an article at The New Yorker exposed the extent of those ties and apparent efforts to cover them up. Alumni participated in a public support campaign that came to exemplify the geek social fallacies. The lab is long-accused of being more a corporate advocacy playground than an incubator of research and the arts.Destroy it, writes Noah Kulwin:What, then, is the point of something like the MIT Media Lab? What is the justification for its continued existence? After all, elite academia is rotted through with corporate sponsorship these days, particularly from Silicon Valley; a 2017 Wall Street Journal report revealed that Google had funded “hundreds” of research papers written by professors from Harvard, UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois and elsewhere, which reached conclusions favorable to the company’s anti-regulation position. As the critic Evgeny Morozov notes in The Guardian, the purpose of the MIT Media Lab is something a little more grand, a little less visibly craven: to create a “third culture” of the elite, replacing “technophobic literary intellectuals with those coming from the world of science and technology.”Put into action, the “third culture” is a safe haven for breathless bullshit, a place where the ultra-rich might fantasize about, say, administering a eugenics scheme in New Mexico with the semen of a convicted serial sexual predator. Whether or not “third culture” progenitors like the Media Lab actually go forward with such an insane idea is beside the point, as they’re just happy to help cash a checkIn looking for a counterpoint, someone outlining how the lab might be saved, I came up blank today, but for an old tweet. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH we wonder whether this whole Alabama hurricane thing is blown out of proportion

Announced yesterday, the new iPhones' most interesting feature is its triple-lensed imaging system, making the tiny gadget comparable to much more expensive cameras. But the holes are making people shudder and shiver, the sensation named trypophobia in the annals of internet lore, if not medical science.Jennings Brown:Those three black circles. What monsters thought this was okay? I get that Apple wanted three lenses, but placed so close together they create a deeply unsettling image of trypophobic terror.Is this bad pic.twitter.com/Q7deYZyxPM— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) September 10, 2019 Read the rest

A random dude did about $15,000 worth of damage to the famous bronze "Charging Bull" sculpture, by attacking it with a banjo. He managed to cut a deep gash in the thick bronze.As Artnet reports:Onlookers watched with cell phones aloft as the man repeatedly bashed the sculpture. They were unsure whether the act was a work of performance art or simply violent vandalism. In the end, the bull was left with a six-inch gash and several scratches, according to reports.Shortly after the incident, authorities arrested Tevon Varlack, a 42-year-old truck driver from Dallas, charging him with criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and criminal possession of a weapon (which, it seems, is the banjo, which was metal and had sharp edges). After spending the night in jail, Varlack appeared for arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday. Varlack, wearing a white t-shirt with the words “Let Us Not Forget The Ten Commandments,” gave no motive for his actions. (The shirt may be a reference to Moses’s anger at the Israelites for worshipping a golden calf.) Varlack was released without bail and is due back in court on October 16. Judge Althea Drysdale ordered him to stay away from city landmarks in the meantime and warned him, “Do not go back and visit the bull.”Wait a minute, you might ask: One can actually cut into thick bronze by hitting it with a banjo?By all means. I've got a Goodtime banjo with a resonator back, and man those things are a) heavy as an anvil and b) possessed of a thick metal rim. Read the rest

I'm looking forward to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's memoirs, Permanent Record, (previously) and just pre-ordered a copy on Amazon. Given the title, I thought it might be interesting to share what Amazon represented as "Frequently bought together" with it and put in its "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" carousel. Under "Frequently bought together" are Randall Munroe's How To, a collection of "absurd scientific advice" offered by the cartoonist's famous stick-figure characters, and Talking To Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell's ill-received latest.In the "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" carousel are books from Glenn Greenwald, Philip Mudd and Snowden himself, all on similar topics. Books dominate the section, in fact, and Amazon reports that viewers of Permanent Record only checked out three things that were not to be read: Sarotti Scho Ka Kola, described as a "famous German chocolate", 20 orange snappy handles, which go on thin metal bucket handles to make them easier to carry, and the Old Smokey Jumbo Grill, pictured above.If you click the links in this post, our permanent records will be forever entwined in Amazon's database, and I'll get my cut. Read the rest

I love semicolons. I probably use too many of them, because of how incredibly flexible they are; how they loosely tie together loosely related ideas; how you can use them for lists. I often use them this way in my journalism, only to have the copy-editors rip out every usage, and instead put in periods. Barbarians.I was pleased, then, to run across Lewis Thomas' paean to the semicolon, in this excellent blog post by Maria Popova quoting from Thomas' essay "Notes on Punctuation". As Thomas writes:I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.Nailed it. I use too many colons, too, though I actually agree with Thomas when he argues that they're kind of ... preachy:Colons are a lot less attractive, for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you’re in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven’t sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Read the rest

Pop culture humorist Charles Phoenix (previously) has been busy this year. He's written a book:Holiday Jubilee is loaded with original eye-popping “test kitchen” recipes and over 500 vintage images, serving up an intoxicating, action-packed extravaganza of America’s favorite seasonal traditions past, present, and future. Your imagination will be inspired and your spirit will soar!And he's created this hilarious and kitschy "Raw" Turkey Tiki Meatloaf Mug ($80). This "meatloaf pan-shaped Moai" is inspired by his Tiki Turkey Dinner, an alt-Thanksgiving recipe found in the book.Hey! Charles will be at Soap Plant WACKO in Los Angeles this Sunday, September 15, signing that new coffee table book of his from 2 to 4 p.m. This line alone, from the event page, makes me want to hop down to LA this weekend: "LIFE ALTERING SNACK and ARTIFICIALLY COLORED AND FLAVORED REFRESHMENTS will be served." Read the rest

Scientists drilled into the Chixclub crater in the Gulf of Mexico to learn more about the end of the mesozoic era. They learned more than they expected, reports Katherine Kornei in The New York Times.The first day of the Cenozoic was peppered with cataclysms. When the asteroid struck, it temporarily carved a hole 60 miles across and 20 miles deep. The impact triggered a tsunami moving away from the crater. It also catapulted rock into the upper atmosphere and beyond.“Almost certainly some of the material would have reached the Moon,” Dr. Gulick said.The largest pieces of debris rained back down to Earth within minutes, Dr. Gulick and his team say, pelting the scarred landscape with solidifying rock. Smaller particles lingered for longer periods, and glassy blobs known as tektites, formed when falling, molten rock cools, have been found across North America and dated to the Chicxulub impact. Within about 30 minutes, ocean water began to flood back into the crater through a gap in its northeastern rim, the researchers suggest. Read the rest

Microsoft Excel has long been taken for granted in the modern office, but that's quickly changing as the field of data analytics becomes more vital. If you haven't moved beyond spreadsheets yet, it might be time to open up the functionality of this trusty platform - and this course on Microsoft Excel Data Analysis & Dashboard Reporting is the easiest way to do it.Taught by certified Microsoft Office Master Instructor Kyle Pew, this 3-hour course packs a ton of insight. In lectures and a series of videos, Pew starts you off with the basic principles of data analysis and some design principles that will help you present that data effectively. Then it's a deep dive into tools like PivotTables, showing you how you can use them to corral massive amounts of data into manageable streams. From there, you can use some common Excel functions to create an interactive dashboard that will be invaluable in any company's business plan.It's all simplified to be useful even for newbies to the field of data analytics, and you can get lifetime access to the entire course for just $19.99. Read the rest

Tarek Loubani is a Palestinian-Canadian doctor who works with the Glia Project, a group that creates open-source designs for 3D-printable medical hardware. Their goal is to let local populations manufacture their own medical wares at prices considerably lower than in the marketplace, and in situations where -- because of distance or war -- it may not even be possible to ship in equipment at any price. Some of their early work has been in blockaded Gaza, for example. So far, Glia has designed a stethoscope that can be made for about $2.83, and a tourniquet that costs about $7 to make.But Glia's also developing a project that's even more ambitious, and crazily interesting: An open-source dialysis machine. In the current issue of Logic magazine (which is amazing front to back, BTW), Loubani talked about how regulatory capture has jacked up the price of dialysis, and how to use open-source to design around it. I'll quote it at length here, because Loubani's description of the problem and the hack is super eloquent:Dialysis is also an interesting problem of capitalism. A good analogy is disposable razors. Broadly, in Canada, there’s Schick and there’s Gillette. You can’t use a Schick razor on a Gillette handle and vice versa. That’s called vendor lock-in. Fundamentally, dialysis machines are a pump, a controller, a flow meter, and a little bit of tubing. Nothing special. The only way for companies to make them profitable is to create vendor lock-in and collude with each other. Read the rest

PHOTO: Shutterstock. TX AG Ken Paxton, shown here, is leading nationwide probe into Google.The Texas attorney general today issued a 29-page civil investigative demand with more than 200 directives for Google to provide detailed information on its ad business. The deadline is October 9.“State attorneys general investigating Google are ordering it to turn over a wide range of information about its advertising business, according to an investigative demand that takes direct aim at the biggest source of the company’s revenue.”The investigative demand seeks details on ad technology and acquisitions, and shows that the investigation is targeting the heart of Google's business model.As Cory wrote earlier, “attorneys general from 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico are collaborating on a joint antitrust investigation of Google's dominance in the ad- and search-markets, but two AGs are sitting this one out: California's Xavier Becerra and Alabama's Steve Marshall.”From tonight's updated reporting by Bloomberg News:Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, which is leading the nationwide probe, on Monday issued a 29-page civil investigative demand obtained by Bloomberg. In more than 200 directives, investigators ordered the company to produce detailed explanations and documents by Oct. 9 related to its sprawling system of online advertising products.The Sept. 9 investigative demand, which is similar to a subpoena, was issued as 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico announced an antitrust investigation of Google from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The attorneys general said they were looking at Google’s advertising practices, but their detailed demand to the company hasn’t been previously reported. Read the rest

You're going to want to unmute your sound for this one.A beautiful rendition of the Legend of Zelda theme song, played on the marimba by Mart0zz.NEVER forget the Legend!This happy blast from the internet past is a great reminder that back in 2011, when it was first posted, not everything in technology was horrible.Our very own arrangement of the Zelda theme. Played on Marimba, Snare drum, Cymbal, Bells, Timpani and fucking Triangle!Filmed and recorded in three days, however, we don't really enjoy drinking milk.Buy our album here. Read the rest

You definitely need some of this cuteness right now.“My cat Tofu REALLY likes her cheeks rubbed,” says IMGURian kokorifado.What a well-loved kitty cat.My cat Tofu REALLY likes her cheeks rubbed. Read the rest

One America News Network (OAN), a conservative news network for people who think Fox News is too liberal, has filed a $10 million dollar defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and its parent companies Comcast and NBC Universal. The network claims Maddow defamed them during an episode of her nightly show when she referred to OANN as "paid Russian propaganda."Maddow was referencing OAN's employment of Kristian Brunovich Rouz as an on-air reporter covering US politics while he is also employed as a reporter for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire. If Sputnik sounds familiar, that could be because it was found to have been part of Russia's 2016 election interference scheme. From The Daily Beast: Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.” OAN's lawsuit also claims that Comcast is engaging in anti-competitive censorship by refusing to carry the channel. No response as of yet from Maddow, Comcast, et al.Herring Networks vs. Rachel Maddow (Scribd) (Photo: top, Shutterstock; below, Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

Eleanor Saitta's (previously) 2016 essay "Coercion-Resistant Design" (which is new to me) is an excellent introduction to the technical countermeasures that systems designers can employ to defeat non-technical, legal attacks: for example, the threat of prison if you don't back-door your product.Saitta's paper advises systems designers to contemplate ways to arbitrage both the rule of law and technical pre-commitments to make it harder for governments to force you to weaken the security of your product or compromise your users.A good example of this is Certificate Transparency, a distributed system designed to catch Certificate Authorities that cheat and issue certificates to allow criminals or governments to impersonate popular websites like Google.Certificate Transparency is embedded in most browsers, which publish an automatic, cryptographically signed stream of observations about the certificates they encounter in the wild, with information about who issued them. These are appended to multiple log-servers in countries around the world, and anyone can monitor these servers to see if their own domain shows up in a certificate they don't recognize.The upshot of this is that if you run a Certificate Authority and your government (or a criminal) says, "Issue a Google certificate so we can spy on people or we'll put you up against a wall and shoot you," you can say to them, "I will do this, but you should know that the gambit will be discovered within an hour, and within 48 hours, we will be out of business." For an attacker to subvert this system, they'd need to compromise the browsers of everyone who they send the fake certificate to (if they can do this, they don't need fake certs!), or they need to hack multiple, well-guarded servers around the world, or they need to get the governments of all the countries where those servers are located to order their operators to secretly subvert them. Read the rest

George Stephanopoulos asked Stephen King to describe his new (and 61st!) book, The Institute. His answer, "Tom Brown's Schooldays go to Hell." Sounds like my kind of book, considering Tom Brown's schooldays were already pretty awful.Image: Good Morning America/YouTube Read the rest

The NCAA is notionally an "amateur" league, but the only thing amateur about it is that the athletes (who risk their health and even their lives) are unpaid, while the universities effectively own and operate wildly profitable pro sports teams.California state senator Nancy Skinner [D] has cosponsored the The Fair Pay to Play Act, which entitles California college athletes to get paid for "the use of their name, image and likeness." The bill -- popular with both labor activists and free market ideologues -- passed the Assembly on Monday 72-0. Governor Newsom is expected to sign the bill in the next 30 days, and it would go into effect in 2023.The NCAA and the colleges that back it strongly oppose the legislation. Athletes like LeBron James strongly support it (and James has received public support from Bernie Sanders: "College athletes are workers. Pay them.").The colleges say it spells the end of California's participation in collegiate sports, predicting that California teams will be excluded from national play (they don't mention the possibility that other states will pass legislation similar to California's). Reducing the importance of college sports to America's universities would be a net positive; American higher-ed has been wildly distorted by sports, with budgets and resources allocated to sports as a way of making alumni happy, without regard to the actual educational priorities of the institutions.Skinner expects opponents to mount court challenges during that time, but she also anticipates a growing corps of allies.Similar bills are in their infancy in state legislatures in Washington and Colorado, and United States Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina, introduced a federal bill this year that would allow college athletes to be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness. Read the rest

The attorneys general from 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico are collaborating on a joint antitrust investigation of Google's dominance in the ad- and search-markets, but two AGs are sitting this one out: California's Xavier Becerra and Alabama's Steve Marshall.Becerra's motives are easy to speculate about: although he talks a good game on reining in corporate power, he also depends heavily on Google for his election campaign funding, and he presides over the state where Google (and other digital monopolists) were founded, and which they notionally call home (though for tax purposes, all Big Tech companies are located at an indeterminate point somewhere in the Irish Sea).No one's sure what Marshall's up to, though. He's a rip-snortin' Republican from a red, rural state. It's possible that he's been so brainwashed by the weird Republican pro-monopoly cultists that he opposes the investigation on ideological grounds, I suppose.It's a pretty bad look for both of them. Google has been one of the top contributors to Becerra’s recent campaigns. The company contributed $US10,200 to his 2016 re-election campaign as a member of the US House of Representatives, making it his eight largest contributor in that campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets. The search giant contributed $US7,300 to his campaign for attorney general last year, according to data from the California Secretary of State’s office.Becerra’s lack of participation in the Google investigation drew condemnation from the other side of the political aisle.“Attorney General Becerra’s refusal to join the bipartisan investigation into the tech giants is embarrassing,” California Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, a Republican, said in an emailed statement. Read the rest

Amazon has a good sale on these four packs of Hanes black T-shirts with pockets. I usually get Gildan Ts, but these are even cheaper right now. Read the rest

For years, researchers have tracked the discrepancy in average life-expectancy predicted by income equality, and, as with the wealth gap itself, this life-expectancy gap just keeps getting wider.A new, Bernie Sanders-commissioned report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reveals that, as with the gap in wealth between the 1% and the 10%, there is a large gap in life-expectancy between the top 1% and the top 10%, and the top 10% and the 11th-20th percentiles.As alarming as this might be to wealthy people who aren't quite wealthy enough to expect those extra years, things are worst for the poorest 80%, whose expected lifespans have decreased so much that the national median life-expectancy for all Americans is actually in decline, as the losses for poor people swamp the gains made by the rich, the super-rich, and the unfathomably rich.What kills old people without enough money? A major factor is a lack of retirement savings, which is an artifact of the annihilation of employer-managed, defined-benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)s and similar systems that make your ability to feed yourself in your old age contingent on your ability to successfully guess which stocks to buy (notably, your bad pension market decisions represent profit for the people who have the most money in America). Another factor: the lack of stable housing (thanks in part to the foreclosure crisis and the erosion of tenant protections).“Over time, the top fifth of the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier — and so much of the health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” said Harold Pollack, a health-care expert at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the creation of the report. Read the rest

This is a maneuver that would be hard to replicate. A Penske truck is headed down a highway in Ontario, Canada when it hits a ditch, crashes into a utility pole, and then somehow leaps up to the roof of a house. The video was caught on a dashcam from a driver headed home from work.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Seriously impressive re-creation of a Nintendo “Home Arcade” classic video arcade unit by an inspired retrogaming enthusiast.It runs on Windows 7 and uses HyperSpin as a frontend for loading games from over 70 systems.“After seeing some inspiration from /r/cade I was determined to spend some time building a home arcade cabinet for my basement,” says IMGURian rubee64. “I had little to no woodworking experience, but by the end I'd acquire a dozen new tools (including a table saw) and learned a great deal about materials and the assembly process.”The project took 5 months of planning and work.Once I had the overall model worked out, I needed to learn a little bit about wiring the buttons (something I’d never done before). After some research I settled on a 56pin I-PAC 4 from Ultimarc. This was just short of the total buttons I was going to need (after Player/Coin and Admin buttons) but I figured it would get me most of the way there.I ordered it along with several sample button types and built a test arcade pad out of MDF to get familiar with my wiring and drilling.Scroll through the entire gallery to get a sense of the intricate level of detail and mastery behind this project. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by Privacy Safe!PrivacySafe is building the anti-cloud. For the first time, you can order a portable, private, and secure IoT storage appliance built on a fully-open stack.Pre-order now to take advantage of early-bird pricing and get discounts on other privacy-respecting services and open hardware.https://privacysafe.ai/indiegogoPocket-sized!Cutting edge, military-grade encryptionFree and Open-Source Software and Open Hardware, so it can be completely audited for malicious code.Your files are encrypted locally, in your home or business, on hardware you can touch.Tor .onion addressingBTCPay Bitcoin payment processing. Avoid payment fees, forever!Monero wallet on-boardMalware protection with real-time virus scan, network, and bluetooth monitorPassword vault with keyring and strong passphrase generator Read the rest